I’m digging the online radio station Pandora. Calling themselves a music genome project, they play music that you haven’t heard but will like based on a few albums or artists that you enter. It’s like a radio station for everybody.

You have to create an account after trying it out so they can support it on an ad based model, but that seems fair. What I like most is that for every song it plays for you, you ask it why it picked it for you. Like — Based on what you told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features electric rock instrumentation, a subtle use of harmony, major key tonality, and other similarities identified by the music genome project. (Division of Labor). I can tell it I don’t like that particular song, then it learns what I like and don’t like. Hopefully this (along with John in the morning at KEXP and my sister Heidi, will help expose me to new music!).

I’m going to try it this Christmas with holiday music…and if Elvis’ “Blue Christmas” pops up I’ll make sure to give a big thumbs down!